New releases from Brocade could appeal to firms considering 4Gbit/s switch upgrades

Brocade has announced two new SilkWorm Fibre Channel (FC) switches – the 4900 and 7500 models – that could appeal to companies that are using FC technology and want to upgrade to 4Gbit/s switching speeds.

The firm has also launched an iSCSI Gateway for transfers to storage area networks (SANs); and the FR4-18i – a blade equivalent to the 7500 for its 48000 Director switch.

“The SilkWorm 7500 is basically the 18-port module [FR4-18i] in an appliance and would be useful if you’re replicating from a branch office using Fibre Channel over IP to Director switches in datacentres,” said Brocade’s Paul Phillips.

The SilkWorm 4900 is a 4Gbit/s 2U, 64-port FC switch with redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans, and hot-code activation for reduced downtime.

The SilkWorm 4900 also offers enhanced Inter-Switch Link (ISL) trunking to support 32Gbit/s data rates in a single trunk.

The iSCSI Gateway is a system for firms wanting to install low-cost iSCSI storage and connect it to the SAN. It has two Gigabit Ethernet links for iSCSI and two FC ports for connecting to the SAN. It addresses a relatively small but growing market.

The SilkWorm 4900 and 7500 switches, iSCSI Gateway and blade module for the 48000 Director are all available now.

Meanwhile, Emulex has launched what it claims is the industry’s first SAN connectivity system for Linux-based virtualised server environments. The system uses Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual host bus adaptor technology and N_Port ID Virtualisation.